Clinicians and other persons involved in providing medical care to patients often wish to use a number of medical instruments and the like that require the use of a patient temperature sensor in order to obtain the temperature of the patient. Often, the patient temperature sensor is a resistive-type sensor (i.e. a sensor that varies its resistance level in accordance with the temperature of a patient on which the sensor is placed such as a thermistor temperature probe). To obtain patient temperature information, a medical instrument supplies an excitation voltage or current to the resistive-type temperature sensor in order to read the resistance level of the sensor. The resistance level of the sensor can then be correlated with patient temperature according to the specifications of the sensor. However, there are a limited number of sites that provide suitable access for such resistive-type patient temperature sensors. Typically, nasopharangeal, bladder, rectal or esophageal sensors are employed to obtain patient temperature. Further, a particular site may provide the best information for a particular therapy. For example, a nasopharangeal sensor may provide the best indication of brain temperature. Thus, a number of medical instruments may have to compete for access to a particular patient temperature monitoring site.
One manner of overcoming the limited number of appropriate temperature sensor sites is to connect a single temperature sensor to multiple medical instruments. However, each medical instrument typically provides its own excitation voltage or current to read the resistance level of the sensor, and the excitation voltage or current of each instrument may be different. Thus, connecting multiple instruments to a single temperature sensor can result in one or more of the instruments obtaining inaccurate patient temperature readings from the sensor.